


The Club (That's Made For You and Me)

by Edwardina



Category: Dead Zone, Supernatural
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-02
Updated: 2007-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-14 03:59:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/511073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edwardina/pseuds/Edwardina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cleaves Mills, Maine. Current day. There are all kinds of people with precognitive abilities out there, and Sam wants to talk to one: Johnny Smith.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Club (That's Made For You and Me)

**Author's Note:**

> Supernatural/The Dead Zone crossover one-shot ficlet. Takes place during S1 of Supernatural. Also, I haven't seen many episodes of The Dead Zone since S3, so if this is wrong in some way, I apologize.

Johnny's just sitting down to Cokes and spaghetti with J.J. when the doorbell rings.

Jeez. It's times like this when he wishes the whole psychic thing didn't just kind of happen whenever it felt the urge to. He touches the end of the table, but still has no clue who's at the door. Eh, it's probably Sarah with J.J.'s forgotten rollerblades or something. She doesn't know they're looking less at an evening full of street hockey and more at an evening full of eating ice cream while watching the new _Star Wars_ trilogy on DVD.

He gives a rueful smile to J.J. and says, "If that's your mom, pretend you've already done your homework, okay?"

"Johnny's a really good teacher, Mom," sings J.J. innocently, before shoveling a fork covered in sauce-drippy noodles into his grinning mouth.

"Oh, yeah, I'm raising a _champ_ ," Johnny exults, and limps off to the front door.

A quick look out the peephole shows him some young guys in a navy blue coveralls waiting on his porch. The taller one's got a toolbox hanging from one fist, and the other's got a clipboard and looks annoyed.

"Huh," Johnny lets out, feeling his eyebrow at work. The patches on their chests are his alarm company's logo, but he didn't call the company or anything, or get the sense that anything was wrong with his extensive set-up. After another moment of consideration, he relaxes his brow and opens the door.

"Mr. Smith?" asks the shorter of the two, eyeing him and the clipboard at the same time somehow.

"You got it. Somethin' wrong with my system, fellas?" Johnny asks.

The taller one seems kind of apprehensive, but he breaks out into a friendly, dimpled smile when Johnny looks at him and is quick to say, "Well, uh - we dunno, Mr. Smith. But we hope not!"

"We got a red light on your system down at H.Q.," reports his companion, sounding more like an ex-Marine than a repairman. Johnny instinctively eyes the names embroidered in Working Joe cursive on their chests. Apparently _Dean_ 's all business, while _Sam_ looks more like a trainee, with his longish college boy hair and nervous smile and wary eyeballing.

"H.Q.?" he echoes, amused in spite of himself. "That sounds pretty - I dunno, NASA or James Bond or something."

"Heh." Dean's teeth glint as he gives an acknowledging incline of his head. "Yeah, I wish. A little less of this chucklehead--" he elbows Sam, who darts a startled - then irritated - glare down at him, "--and a little more Denise Richards would do me good, know what I'm sayin'? We were sent to check it out, though... see if there's just a crossed wire inducing a power surge or if there's a more serious malfunction. Should only take a few minutes."

Johnny smiles at Sam, who's towering there awkwardly, then at Dean, and moves aside.

"Come on in, guys."

They smile back, all polite, and before Johnny shuts the front door he glimpses a shiny black Chevy Impala parked out front. It's a nice car, if your eye's inclined towards classics... but it's no company van. That's when Johnny knows for certain there's something off, here - something wrong. That these guys aren't from the alarm company. He turns with a benign smile, though.

"Set-up's in the kitchen. Me and my son are in the middle of a spaghetti dinner - sorry to eat in front of you."

It's calculated, but Johnny's perfected the art by now. He claps Dean casually on the shoulder, and _Dean scowls, throwing down the folder of newspaper clippings._

_"Sam, you know I'm all for reaching out to fellow freaks so you can pow-wow like some kinda psychic Mickey Mouse Club, but this guy -- well, first off, he ain't like you. Too old. The articles on him date back a few years, too, so he didn't just come into his powers in the last year. An' his mother -- how did she die, again?"_

_"Peacefully, in her sleep," Sam answers succinctly, sipping his coffee and looking like he's purposefully ignoring everything else Dean's saying._

_They're in the Ramada Inn off Route 9, three hours outside of Bangor, give or take. This northeast weather, it's cool and gray - and this whole small town, family-friendly, always stuck behind a friggin' school bus goin' at residential street speeds vibe always annoys Dean, 'cause he's seen too many small towns and their friendly-ass ways are somehow less friendly to him than the open road._

_"Yeah," Dean says, like J.J. says 'duh.' "Not pinned to the ceiling. Not on fire. Not when he was six months old. You didn't even have some kinda dream about him, so he's not related to any of this. He doesn't fit the pattern, no matter which way you turn it and try to make it fit."_

_"I don't care," Sam says firmly. "Not all people with abilities were visited by the demon, Dean. Look at Missouri. There are all kinds of cases out there. All kinds of people with precognitive abilities at all different levels. There always have been. But this guy..."_

_"Bonkers," announces Dean. "He's tied up with some weirdo religious group, dude. And the cops!"_

_Sam looks up at Dean, then, like he has to acknowledge the truth of at least some of that statement, but he still says, resolutely, "I just wanna check him out. See if he's the real deal. Why shouldn't we have our own contacts instead of using Dad's all the time? Anyway, don't you think we could use the kind of information this guy could offer?"_

"Huh," Johnny repeats.

"Well, we're real sorry to bother you during dinner," Sam is saying. He sounds oddly sincere for someone who's deliberately casing Johnny. It's a huge to-do, though - the uniforms, the toolbox, the So Sorry, Mr. Smith, This'll Just Take A Few Minutes act, and there's something about its whole practiced air that Johnny doesn't quite get. He senses, though, with a sureness, that these guys aren't out to harm him - or worse, J.J. They're here to check him out for red flags, not his alarm system.

"Nah, it's no problem," Johnny says easily, following them into the kitchen, where J.J.'s already cleaned half his plate and is looking at them all with a saucy chin and raised eyebrows. "J.J., that's Dean and Sam. They're here to see if my security system's on the fritz. Hey, you guys want a Coke or anything?"

Sam looks at Dean, who glances at Sam, and Johnny watches an instantaneous exchange of information go on in that split second before Dean's grinning at him and J.J., just as friendly as Johnny. "Aw, sure, that'd be great. Y'know, this kinda reminds me of spaghetti night with _my_ dad..."

"Yeah?" Johnny moves to pull two more cans of Coke out of the fridge, watching Sam go straight to the security system's epicenter and eye it as if he's actually interested.

"Oh, yeah," Dean says grandly, and surveys the lay-out of food and DVDs on the counter as he joins Sam at the mounted monitor on Johnny's kitchen wall. "Good times. _Star Wars_ too, huh? It just me, or is Mace Windu totally more badass than basically everyone else? 'Cept Han, of course. There's no out-badassin' Han Solo."

"Yeah!" cheers J.J. out of nowhere. "Mace Windu's my favorite! I got his action figure from my dad - my other dad --"

Dean grins at J.J., and there's no awkwardness about that whole 'other dad' thing, much to Johnny's surprise.

"Finally, someone else knows what I'm talkin' about. The purple light saber, man. It takes a lot Force to make that not the lamest thing ever. 'Course, it is Samuel L. Jackson. Well... you got the deluxe set-up goin' on, don't ya? Looks okay, but let's see what's goin' on behind the panel, here." He drops onto his knees and squints at the box. "Sam, you leave this one to me. You don't know crap about this model. Oh, sweet. Thanks."

Dean takes the offered Coke and _gives the spaghetti a stir, ignoring Sam's wheedle of, "Dean, you're gonna burn the garlic bread!"_

_"I am not. What do you know about cooking, anyway?" Dean demands grumpily. He moves to check the oven anyway, Converse squeaking on the linoleum floor. To his annoyance, the bread is looking a little too brown, and he sticks on an oven mitt in the shape of a cow that they got at the dollar store and whips the tray of toasted bread out of the oven, eyeing it mercilessly._

_"See? One more minute and it would've been too burned to eat," Sam says smugly. "Smooth, Martha Stewart, real smooth --"_

_Dean kicks him in the shin. "Shut up!"_

_"Jerk!" Sam wheezes._

_"Shut up," repeats Dean, setting down the tray, "and stir the sauce. Dad'll be home any minute."_

_"Yeah, right," grumbles Sam, and he looks at the clock on the little kitchen wall, also a dollar store relic. It's got a race car on it and was probably meant to be hung anywhere other than a cramped apartment kitchen. It's already past nine - way past when all the other kids at school eat dinner. He stirs absentmindedly until it's ten, watching_ Family Matters _over his shoulder, and finally he and Dean can't wait any longer for Dad. They watch the ten o'clock news and stuff their faces with limp, over-cooked spaghetti and too-brown garlic toast._

So they're brothers, these two - and Sam, this tall young man, all wide smile and dimple and overly-long fingers and "Thank you!" as Johnny hands him his Coke, is _sitting up in bed with ice-cold sweat on his back, a chill of total horror slithering up his spine. It's so real. It's so real, Jessica -- Jessica, next to him in bed -- Jessica, on fire, her little white slip gashed and blood-soaked. Jessica's dead eyes. Jessica's last breath. The blaze that erupts over the ceiling like the gaping slit in Jessica's stomach is the mouth of hell._

_He stares down, almost unseeing, at her, real and warm and alive, in nothing but her Gryffindor Quidditch Team t-shirt. Sleeping. No -- she lifts her head, turns her face up to him. She's awake, just a little._

_"Sam," she says, throatily. He can't even breathe, and she pushes herself onto an elbow so she can reach up and touch his face, pulling him out of the fire and back into their warm, safe bed, in their little normal bedroom with its little normal bookcase full of_ Gossip Girl _books and John Mayer CDs. "Seriously," she murmurs, all reproachful, "no more junk food before bed. It just gives you bad dreams."_

_The smile Sam turns down on her is reluctant, tiny._

It's an instantaneous vision, coming quick and thunderous as a thought and lasting only a second, while both of them are touching the soda can, and the whole experience becomes like the other hundreds - maybe thousands, at this point - of things Johnny's experienced. It's real, like it happened to him. It's his nightmare. And there's so much more to Jessica, Johnny can feel it - but it's all painful, even her beautiful smile, and it all gives Johnny that cold sweat feeling.

Still, he returns Sam's friendly smile as he sits himself in front of his dinner again. J.J.'s watching Dean like a hawk, if hawks ever have spaghetti hanging from their beaks. Apparently any and all cool points Johnny scored with a salad-free dinner and the promise of staying up way past J.J.'s bedtime to watch _Star Wars_ for the forty-fifth time have been deducted from his tally and added to this guy's.

Well, kids are like that.

"So, Sam," Johnny says, and just lays it out on the table, his psychic thing, as he wraps spaghetti around his fork. "Couldn't help noticing, just now. Jessica... the fire. You still having nightmares?"

The ensuing look Sam gives him is priceless - it goes from startled to astonished to grim in under five seconds. On the floor by the alarm system panel, Dean stops unscrewing and looks over warily.

"Uhm," blurts Sam. "Nightmares? I..."

Johnny's eyes meet his, then.

"Yeah, totally saw that," he says calmly. "You did do your research, right, Sam? You know I don't do interviews, so contacting me to ask for one wouldn't work. You know I have people open my mail for me, so you couldn't write me. It's a pretty good disguise, the repairman look and all. You could've fooled anyone else. Except for the car. It's a beauty, by the way! What's the mileage on that thing?"

In front of him, Sam folds like a house of cards, blinking and intense.

"Don't have to be psychic to see things," Johnny adds. "Me - I touch things, people - I get visions. Sometimes they're important, sometimes they're random. Whatever wants to come, whatever's on the surface. I had one of you and your brother, just now, making spaghetti. You were nine. My guess is that you were remembering it just now. But you - you have nightmares. You have visions about people dying."

"Yeah..." he breathes out, looking relieved and stricken at once. "Yeah, that's right."

"Still eating junk food before bed?" asks Johnny, forking his spaghetti into his mouth.

"I wish that were it," Sam replies fervently. "Mr. Smith... sometimes I have them... these... visions... while I'm awake, now."

"Yeah? Well, join the club. Or maybe I can join yours. Something about a psychic Mickey Mouse Club? Do we have to wear shirts with our names on 'em?"

Sam and Dean both look down at their faux alarm company coveralls, then, and Dean coughs uncomfortably.

"By the way," says Johnny, "my mother killed herself. The cause of death was covered up by that weirdo religious group, which, contrary to popular opinion, I'm not affiliated with. It's no burning ceiling, I know, but - gotta set the facts straight."

There's an awkward beat, then. Johnny smiles and forks a meatball.

"Mr. Smith," begins Sam, sounding a lot like Johnny's old students back at Cleaves Mills High, like he's raising his hand to get permission to speak. "I wanted to ask you some questions... questions no one else can give me the answer to."

"Okay, Sam. But before we get into that - call me Johnny. And take a seat, why don't you?"


End file.
